Tag: innovation

03.20.18

LaunchLab Ideas Programme calling all Entrepreneurs

BY Fast Company 3 MINUTE READ

Calling all entrepreneurs to pitch their innovative ideas in the LaunchLab Ideas Programme – winning ideas stand the chance to win incubation support worth R50 000 and access to our clients!

The Stellenbosch University LaunchLab has officially launched the 7th Ideas programme following 6 successful programmes to date!

LaunchLab’s mission is to facilitate valuable connections for startups and corporates, as well as other relevant business partners to help those startups excel. The Ideas Programme is intended primarily to be for very early-stage businesses looking to validate their concepts or improve their technology offering to their market.

LaunchLab provides access to our client network who are actively looking for startups to partner with, which aids in the validation process.

LaunchLab is looking for startup business ideas in multiple industries, including but not limited to:

  • Education: we are pleased to be helping Stellenbosch University to identify innovative edutech solutions that can help contribute to new models of education to empower students to create jobs and add value to broader society.
  • Smart Cities: the cities of the future need smart solutions and our clients want your help developing these solutions.
  • Cleantech: the world is on a drive to sustainability and South Africa is no different. Submit your ideas to help South Africa harness its natural resources better and recycle what we have already used.
  • Internet of Things (IoT): connected devices means more information to make our lives easier and more efficient. Help our clients with your IoT concepts that can transform their supply chains and make customers’ lives better.
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI): pitch how you think AI will impact our world with your exciting concept. Calling all engineers and data scientists to wow our clients.
  • Advanced Manufacturing: this is another opportunity for engineers and data scientists to make an impact on this important sector in South Africa. Strong candidates and concepts will have access to opportunities with our corporate clients.
  • Safety: help us make South Africans safer with your innovative concept.
  • Blockchain: Each industry that mainly acts as a middleman between producers and customers of immaterial or digital goods and services is vulnerable to being replaced by a peer-to-peer system supported by the Blockchain. Tell us how you will do this.
  • Fintech:we are looking for disruptive technologies in the financial services industry that can transform the way we interact with money.
  • Insurtech: pitch your ideas of what the future of insurance will look like.
  • Agritech and Food Innovations:LaunchLab has already been the birthing ground for some exciting food and agritech innovations. Will your concept be the next one?
  • Social Enterprises:do you have a business idea which can have a big impact and benefit those that need it most but still be a viable business? Take advantage of this opportunity to pitch it.

This programme helps new concepts and potential businesses validate their concepts with real market players and starts their journey towards the maturity required to acquire customers and obtain investment.

These are the highlights of the impact of our programme is South Africa in 2017:

  • 24 selected for our incubation programme
  • 10 pilots being pursued with LaunchLab clients
  • 4 invested in directly by LaunchLab clients
  • R1.18 million in total prize money paid across all programmes

“The wide range of industry focus areas this year means that you will find a place for your innovative business idea. This is a great opportunity to accelerate that business idea towards market readiness. The impact that engaging with our corporate clients offers cannot be underestimated. We find that startups that engage with our clients can accelerate their growth faster than startups following the traditional route to market because the client does not only help provide finance for the startup but access to market as well.” says Philip Marais, LaunchLab CEO.

Submission requirements:

Submit a 3-minute video (cell phone footage can be submitted too) of yourself explaining your business idea with your entry form which can be found on the LaunchLab website: https://www.launchlab.co.za/ideas2018

Submissions opened on 19 March, and the deadline for online submission entries is 4 May 2018. The top ten finalists will be notified by the end of May. Pitches will be shortlisted and be taken through a process to determine which 10-15 businesses we will take into our incubation programme, to develop towards engaging with our clients.

LaunchLab’s terms and conditions apply, and are available to download here:  https://launchlab.co.za/innovationchallenges/competition-terms-conditions/

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03.15.18

From the frontier:Predictions for how tech will shape the world in 2018

BY Fast Company 4 MINUTE READ

A lot can happen in a year. And when that year is 2018, a year in which we stand on the threshold of an exponential future driven by technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, IoT and blockchain, the world may look very different by the end of it than it does now.

It is often productive to take some time in the early part of a year to consider (and imagine) what the next 10-12 months will hold. At the very least it affords us an opportunity to dream big and consider the implications of new trends, products, and services, as well as their underlying technologies. At best, we gain invaluable insight into how these technology trends will affect, improve or disrupt our businesses, our work and our personal lives, and help us reach previously unattainable goals, progress, (and even distant planets!)

Here are my (and my colleagues’) top technology predictions for 2018:

  1. In aerospace, the commercial airplane industry will see cool, new products and innovations. We’ll see the first legitimate applications of large-scale autonomous air taxis and hypersonic aircraft. In space, the journey to Mars is closer than we think. Our own Head of Innovation, Adriana Marais, is even shortlisted to be one of the first humans to undertake a manned mission to the Red Planet. 2018 is set to re-ignite our imaginations around space travel.
  2. In the manufacturing arena we will see the use of 3D Printing (or additive manufacturing) and robotics accelerating as companies position themselves to be more responsive, less wasteful and more competitive in a global context.
  3. Across Africa we will see agricultural value chains embracing technology as both government and private sector organisations work towards food security for Africa’s exploding population in the face of climate change, water shortages and land degradation. Technologies will be used to help both small and large-scale farmers achieve better outcomes with less impact on the environment and less wastage in the supply chain
  4. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will become mainstream in business in 2018. You can break it down into three categories:

A)     Advanced analytics and big data plays, where the aggregation of data will enable fresh and deep insights and       allow the creation of new business models,

B)    Business process automation, where we’ll see a high degree of back-end business processing being done by algorithms, freeing up human resources to be more productive and creative, and

C)    Customer experience, where we’ll see more intelligent and personalised layers between humans and systems, like voice navigation and human-like virtual assistants.

5. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things, and blockchain will also enable new        business models and create new markets driven by start-ups and agile corporates that can embrace these     trends and understand the potential value propositions that can come out of it.

6.On the workplace culture side, we’re going to see a significant refocus on cultural aspects of organisations, specifically how company culture and its practices support the needs and well-being of the organisation. Companies are realising that if they don’t have the culture and the practices to support a healthy, productive environment for their workers, they’re not going reach their goals.

7.Design will assume a heightened eminence as companies, with equal and easy access to the latest technology platforms seek ways to establish a competitive edge in the way they apply technology to unforeseen problems and opportunities.

8.One of the biggest stories in 2018 will be cybersecurity. The explosion in software, technology, and connected devices open many new threat vectors, at the same time that the regulatory environment is becoming significantly tougher.  Security systems must keep pace in the same fashion. We desperately need to get those protocols and security measures in place.

9.Today there is a “land grab” happening in the IoT space as vendors, large and small, jostle for leadership. SAP’s global IoT evangelist Tom Raftery predicts that the IoT cloud platform market is going to consolidate quickly. “The IoT hype is going to finish and we’re going to move into possibly a ‘trough of disillusionment’ – as Gartner calls it – that precedes mainstream adoption. IoT architecture will evolve from data ingestion and analytics (the “thing to dashboard” paradigm) to an intelligent event-driven solution for end users. Digital twins will evolve from concepts to implementation providing new simulation and decision-making capabilities within and across companies.”

10.Cameron Beveridge, SAP’s local cloud lead, predicts that we’re going to see companies reassess their strategic technical plan – possibly even stopping some of the roadmaps and re-evaluating options for the cloud, as well as moving forward with ERP transformations and improving total cost of operations by streamlining business processes and technical architecture. “There will be quite a bit around end-to-end transformation and being more innovative and proactive in business processes.”

By Simon Carpenter, Chief Technology Advisor at SAP Africa

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

 About SAP

 As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 345,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

 

 About Simon Carpenter, Chief Technology Advisor SAP Africa:

Simon has 33 years of wide-ranging experience in the IT sector. The last 21 years have been with marketleader SAP’s African business where he has held a number of leadership positions.

Simon is currently the Chief Technology Advisor (CTA) ensuring that:

  • SAP technology vision and strategy is fully evangelized
  • SAP is seen as a thought leader in the digital economy
  • Customers and partners understand and adopt SAP solutions leveraging latest SAP recommended technology strategy
  • Customers consistently get high quality SAP resources for their innovation, technology strategy and roadmap creation
  • SAP has a robust pipeline of innovation opportunities.

Simon has worked predominantly in the area of operations and logistics solutions ranging from on-board computing in transport; to large-scale enterprise systems. He has broad experience having worked in sales, marketing, support management, project management, and consulting and systems development. He thus has good insight into the soft issues (such as change management) that must be addressed for any technological initiative to be successful.

Simon has spoken at numerous local and international conferences and Universities on a wide range of topics and is a previous Best Speaker award winner at the SAPICS conference.

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02.13.18

What happens to your Bitcoin if you die?

BY Nate Lanxon 3 MINUTE READ
Five years ago, Matthew Moody was killed during an observational flight when the two-seater plane he was in crashed flying over a canyon in Chico, California.
 
His father, Michael Moody, knew his 26-year-old son had been mining Bitcoins — today worth thousands of dollars each — but had no idea how many he had or how to find them. Michael Moody has spent the past three years seeking the answers. 
 
“My son was actually one of the earliest people to mine it,” said Moody, a retired software engineer. “He used his computer at home to mine Bitcoins when you actually could do it that way and he had a few we think.”
 
The decentralized and unregulated nature of Bitcoin means that without the keys to access his son’s digital wallet, hosted by blockchain.info, Moody has no way of accessing any funds. 
 
And it’s almost impossible to find out whether a person is sitting on peanuts or a fortune, as wallets can contain an unlimited number of unique addresses, or identifiers, with Bitcoins assigned to each. Without knowing every address, it’s not possible to locate every piece of currency. 
 
Blockchain.info did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
 
“There is no authority that could be appealed to fix this,” Nolan Bauerle, director of research at cryptocurrency analysis website CoinDesk, said of an individual’s Bitcoin stash becoming inaccessible after they pass away. “Those coins would be abandoned.”
 
Moody says entrepreneurial young people, unfamiliar with emerging digital currencies, need to be better educated about the steps needed to be taken to ensure their investments are properly secured, both for themselves and for future heirs.
 
Coin Offerings
 
In the 1990s your digital legacy that might have just meant email accounts, but today extends to passwords, encrypted device backups, photo archives, personal data held by search engines, advertisers and social networks — and now cryptocurrencies.  
 
Issues around inheritance include initial coin offerings, the process of raising money from investors by offering them virtual “tokens” instead of shares. In 2017, about $3.5 billion was raised worldwide from ICOs, according to data compiled by CoinDesk.
 
The relatively nascent practice of holding an ICO means legislation is yet to catch up, meaning questions around what happens to a person’s rightful tokens when they die are numerous. But following a number of lawsuits, U.S. lawmakers will soon decide whether a token acquired from an ICO will be considered no different to a share bought through an IPO.
 
“My bet is that ICOs, when issued by a company, they’re going to be considered securities,” said Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University Law School and veteran SEC and Justice Department lawyer. “If they are securities, then just like stock or bonds you can put them in your will and pass them down.”
 
Bitcoin Security
 
Some firms are beginning to make provisions. CoinBase is a custodial service, which holds a customer’s private keys — the kind that if lost would otherwise render any Bitcoins permanently inaccessible — and as such is able to provide some level of security in the event of a person’s death. The company asks for documents such as a death certificate and will in order to transfer the assets. 
 
It’s not a solution that some enthusiasts will be keen to use, as the idea of someone else being in custody of Bitcoins is antithetical to decentralized, user-controlled ethos that sparked an interest in the anonymous currency in the first place. 
 
CoinBase declined to comment for this story.
 
The safekeeping of a private key remains the bottleneck regarding the inheritance of Bitcoins. The startup Ledger SAS, which in January raised 61 million euros ($75 million) from investors makes electronic Bitcoin wallets. These use USB dongles to store passwords for accessing and spending cryptocurrency. Of course, if your heirs can’t find the dongle or don’t recognize it for what it is, the problem remains. 
 
Ian Purton, CEO of the StrongCoin digital wallet service, said it’s an issue that has arisen as the industry matures, “and people start to consider family and what would happen to their digital assets.”
 
“When we first started out it was all about how we can best secure Bitcoin from hackers,” he said. “Now, our focus is also on protecting users who may be unfamiliar with cryptography.”
 
– BLOOMBERG 
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